All Things

Why George W. Bush is the Best President Ever

Now that we're in the last six months of the 2nd Bush's presidency, discussions of his presidency have evolved into discussions of his legacy.

  In those discussions--whether at work, in social settings, or online--for a couple months now I've been uttering variations of "George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst emperor since Caligula."

  It usually gets at least a chuckle.  Or, the online version of a chuckle, which is the almost-always exaggerated "LOL".

  Yes, it's my cute, twisty, nouveau variation on the now hackneyed "worst president ever" label that we hear bandied about so often.  Clever, isn't it, how it combines executive overreaching, incompetence, and self-delusion into a single quippable expression?  With faint shadows of the excess and decadence that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

  But recently, by sifting through the events, the causes and effects, the variety of outcomes and stimuli that our leader and his administration have acted on over the past 7.5 years, I have found myself experiencing inklings...feeling little twitches of doubt, gasping at the edge of realizations, teetering at the brink of a complete topsy-turvy....

  And I've found myself approaching a singular conclusion.  Well, I'm there now. 

  I was completely wrong.

  In fact, George W. Bush is the best president we've ever had in the United States of America.

  But the man is so brilliant, so self-effacing, so humble, so unagrandizing that nobody in our time will actually ever know that, far from being the "worst president ever" or the "worst emperor since Caligula," GW is actually saving the planet, saving the United States, saving North America--indeed saving humankind itself from a horrible fate.

  How?  You ask HOW CAN THIS BE?  How can George "Heckuvajob, Brownie!" Bush, how can G.W. "Mission Accomplished!" Bush, how on earth can "Dubya" be so good, so clever, as to LOOK LIKE the worst sort of mixture of cronyism, incompetence, inarticulence... spend-like-a-democrat tax-like-a-Reaganist, walk-and-talk-like Larry the CableGuy (with less humor and less intelligence)...how can he seem like such a clear-cut incompetent, yet be the Best President Ever?

  Let's begin the overview by asking a question...

  What do the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Katrina fiasco, the financial crises, rising inflation, Enron, and the falling dollar have in common?

  Answer:  They're tightly linked to energy industries, mostly petroleum and natural gas. 

  I know, it's no secret that Bush and Cheney, and many of the rest of the cronies, are tied in with oil or energy. 

  But what I'm saying is that what looks like bungling may actually be intentional.  Notice how our country's blood and treasure and anguish in Iraq were supposed to get us some oil in return, to at least partially defray those huge economic costs--but it didn't happen?  How we all have less money, or to put it another way, how money in general has less value than it did 8 years ago?  How the fall of Enron (an energy trader) resulted in strictures on business that further erode our pocketbooks and discourage new development of traditional energy resources like oil and petroleum? How a couple of hurricanes--and a bungled response--in the refining belt accellerated the major disruption of the oil crisis which has resulted in the cost of crude oil rising from $23 to $140 per barrel during the past 7 years?

  People have observed these connections before. 

  But I've finally figured out why.  Why it all fits.

  Bush has a double-secret stealth plan, and every different plank of that secret plan was designed, and implemented, throughout important material facets of our society, to increase the cost of energy, especially fossil fuels.

  Why does this make Bush the best president in history?

  Because he recognizes that humankind will need massive reserves of energy within the next two to three generations, when the earth's population doubles to 14 billion, then doubles again--

  We'll need the the gas, the oil--the energy--not for the silly purposes of ferrying those 14-billion people around in big burping steel vehicles, commuting 5 or 10 or 50 miles to work, or to orthodontic visits and soccer games, or more crucial needs such as plowing and cultivating Idaho and Nebraska in their entireties to feed the teeming billions, or to desalinate the oceans to slake their thirsts...

  There is an even more dire, more crucial need than that...

  The double-secret stealth plan is this: 

  Drive the price of oil, and energy in general, up, way up, because we're using it all up way too fast, and for frivolity and folly.  If gasoline costs $5, $7, $11! a gallon, we're going to find another way to get to work, or change the way we live, and we're going to use a lot less, and leave more energy in the ground.

  Yes, I know, I can see you out there nodding your heads, you think I'm going to say "Bush is doing this because he and his friends will reap from this windfall."  But remember, I am arguing that he's The Best Ever, not a greedy profiteer.

  Only two, maybe three generations from now, there will be a generation that must rise to a momentous challenge.  With 15, 18, 20 billion humans on this watery, ever-warming rock, this specific future generation will have to rise, literally, from within the binds of gravity, and select, and terraform, and colonize another world. 

  If there's no escaping this planet, there's no escaping the stark conclusion that there's no escape, period. 

  In January 2004, George W. Bush let leak a little glimmer of his double-secret stealth plan when he stated We're goin' to Mars...and beyond.  He was ridiculed, accused of fantasizing during times of crisis, pipe-dreaming when we need to focus on the all-too-real problems of our own world.  But it was a visionary's vision.  As Columbus raised his eyes to the horizon, Bush raised his to the stars.

  But how are we going to get there--or even to the moon or Mars--if we've fried up all of Earth's energy reserves solo-commuting to work in Hummers, drag racing those jet-fuel dragsters, Jet-skiing the Choptank inlet, and flying to St. Louis for that 30-minute meeting that would've been a slam-dunk in teleconference mode?

  So why, you might say, why didn't he just come out and make changing our whole way of life a central thrust of his presidency?  Why the secrecy?

  That's the brilliance of the whole thing.  It wouldn't have worked. 

  We didn't elect Al Gore, we elected George W. Bush .  We didn't learn our lesson after the oil crises in the mid and late seventies, did we?  We didn't want to face the truth eight years ago, and we don't want to start now.

We had to be forced.  Taken firmly by the shoulders, and turned to face the music.  It had to be a Double-Secret Stealth Energy Plan, and Dubya had to look like a stumbling, mumbling, backwoods yet fortunate-son buffoon, or it never would have worked. That sacrifice, and the accomplishment (energy demand is reportedly already decreasing) of the objective, is why George W. Bush must, eventually, in some distant time, be recognized as the Bestest President Ever.

  Perhaps that generation, that special near-future generation that must engineer an escape, a great migration almost unfathomable in its challenge and scope, will look back, and understand.

 

Town Andrews is a registered Republican, and wishes GW didn't have to destroy the party to save the world.  But perhaps that's the price of progress.